A Large-Scale Group Decision Making Model Based on Trust Relationship and Social Network Updating

With the development of big data and social computing,large-scale group decisionmaking(LGDM)is nowmerging with social networks.Using social network analysis(SNA),this study proposes an LGDM consensus model that considers the trust relationship among decisionmakers(DMs).In the process of consensusmeasurement:the social network is constructed according to the social relationship among DMs,and the Louvain method is introduced to classify social networks to form subgroups.In this study,the weights of each decision maker and each subgroup are computed by comprehensive network weights and trust weights.In the process of consensus improvement:A feedback mechanism with four identification and two direction rules is designed to guide the consensus of the improvement process.Based on the trust relationship among DMs,the preferences are modified,and the corresponding social network is updated to accelerate the consensus.Compared with the previous research,the proposedmodel not only allows the subgroups to be reconstructed and updated during the adjustment process,but also improves the accuracy of the adjustment by the feedbackmechanism.Finally,an example analysis is conducted to verify the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method.Moreover,compared with previous studies,the superiority of the proposed method in solving the LGDM problem is highlighted.

PLDMLT:Multi-Task Learning of Diabetic Retinopathy Using the Pixel-Level Labeled Fundus Images

In the field of medical images,pixel-level labels are time-consuming and expensive to acquire,while image-level labels are relatively easier to obtain.Therefore,it makes sense to learn more information(knowledge)from a small number of hard-to-get pixel-level annotated images to apply to different tasks to maximize their usefulness and save time and training costs.In this paper,using Pixel-Level Labeled Images forMulti-Task Learning(PLDMLT),we focus on grading the severity of fundus images for Diabetic Retinopathy(DR).This is because,for the segmentation task,there is a finely labeled mask,while the severity grading task is without classification labels.To this end,we propose a two-stage multi-label learning weakly supervised algorithm,which generates initial classification pseudo labels in the first stage and visualizes heat maps at all levels of severity using Grad-Cam to further provide medical interpretability for the classification task.A multitask model framework with U-net as the baseline is proposed in the second stage.A label update network is designed to alleviate the gradient balance between the classification and segmentation tasks.Extensive experimental results show that our PLDMLTmethod significantly outperforms other stateof-the-art methods in DR segmentation on two public datasets,achieving up to 98.897%segmentation accuracy.In addition,our method achieves comparable competitiveness with single-task fully supervised learning in the DR severity grading task.

A survey of network update in SDN

Network is dynamic and requires update in the operation. However, many confusions and problems can be caused by careless schedule in the update process. Although the problem has been investigated for many years in tradi- tional networks where the control plane is distributed, soft- ware defined networking （SDN） brings new opportunities and solutions to this problem by the separation of control and data plane, as well as the centralized control. This paper makes a survey on the problems caused by network update, includ- ing forwarding loop, forwarding black hole, link congestion, network policy violation, etc., as well as the state-of-the-art SDN solutions to these problems. Furthermore, we summa- rize the network configuration strength and discuss the open issues of network update in the SDN paradigm.

Resilient TCP Variant Enabling Smooth Network Updates for Software-Defined Data Center Networks

Network updates have become increasingly prevalent since the broad adoption of software-defined networks(SDNs)in data centers.Modern TCP designs,including cutting-edge TCP variants DCTCP,CUBIC,and BBR,however,are not resilient to network updates that provoke flow rerouting.In this paper,we first demonstrate that popular TCP implementations perform inadequately in the presence of frequent and inconsistent network updates,because inconsistent and frequent network updates result in out-of-order packets and packet drops induced via transitory congestion and lead to serious performance deterioration.We look into the causes and propose a network update-friendly TCP(NUFTCP),which is an extension of the DCTCP variant,as a solution.Simulations are used to assess the proposed NUFTCP.Our findings reveal that NUFTCP can more effectively manage the problems of out-of-order packets and packet drops triggered in network updates,and it outperforms DCTCP considerably.